...Either case, this little nook on blogasphere is the natural dumping ground for the sort of crap that eruptswhen you find a wee Chink in the Britworks...

But hey, I promise you this is steamingly hot shit...which is probably why it's all looking a bit brown!

Enter your search termsSubmit search form

Web

The Lava Trolley

27 June 2005

Women – Know your place!

It was during another round of Test the Nation when women were (yet again) soundly trounced, that I began to wonder if men were perhaps truly superior in the mental arena. Not about to turn traitor to the feminist cause, I made a point of doing some research on the differences between the male and female psyche, with every hope that science would reinstate my faith in womankind.

Ashes from Germaine Greer’s bra-burning days have long since settled, and some believe that significant milestones have been achieved in ending the oppression of the supposedly weaker sex…Yet, gender wars go on, and not just in TV game shows, but in the home and work environment as well…Clearly, the end of the “anything you can do, I can do better” debate is nowhere in sight…Not yet, at any rate…This begs the question: Just what are us women good for, apart from making babies?

As expected, there was enough information out there to rival all the spam on cyberspace, and not very much of it was new. Since one’s bandwidth deals better with bytes than neurons, I shall spare all readers as much of the science bit as possible and stick only to details that were found intriguing.

1) Like a baby just learning how to work a shape-sorter, Nature sometimes makes a few mistakes when slotting our brains into place:

“There are three common brain types: for some individuals, empathising isstronger than systemising. This is called the female brain, or a brain of typeE. For other individuals, systemising is stronger than empathising. This iscalled the male brain, or a brain of type S. Yet other individuals are equallystrong in their systemising and empathising. This is called the "balancedbrain", or a brain of type B… A key feature of this theory is that your sexcannot tell you which type of brain you have.”

Hmmm…That would explain an anomaly like Michael Jackson.

He can barely decide if he's black or white, let alone male or female.

Anyhow, this is a moot point. It only supports the theory that gender roles are determined by society rather than one's sex. Who decides what is masculine or feminine anyway?2) There is no evidence to show that one gender is more intelligent than the other.

“While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between thesexes, a UC Irvine study has found significant differences in brain areas wheremales and females manifest their intelligence.”

According to the results, both men and women are capable of attaining the same IQ level…We just don’t use the same methods to get there.

The human brain is made up of grey and white matter. The grey’s job description is to process all the information, while the white is predominantly occupied with networking.

To put it in simple terms, greys excel when sitting there on their own working things out, while the whites work wonders at ensuring all in the cell community are communicating with one another.

“Men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of grey matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men.”

So it would make perfect sense that the male brain is more suited for tasks involving spatial and quantitative abilities, whilst its female counterpart is more adept at verbal activities and perceptual speed/accuracy.

“The male advantages here reflect more specialized skill while the femaleadvantages are inherently more integrative.”

The claim that women are better at multi-tasking does appear to have some legitimacy after all!

Or perhaps all this means is that us girlies are quicker at making associations between certain concepts...

I'll say this...I have noticed that men with all-rounded skills are the exception rather than the rule, which is why jobs as Administrators, Nurses, Housekeepers etc tend to be predominantly in the province of women. But...just because we can fill many roles doesn't mean we can perform them all at the same time!

3) It's official...Men are more intuitive than women.

Hmmm…do I detect a sense of outrage in the female community?

Hardly surprising if that were true, since drawing on intuition is a favourite ploy in feminine tactics. Apparently, this has to do with the difference in which the left part of the brain works, and that of the right. Men tend to use the right-side of the brain more than the left, whilst women are more likely to do the opposite.

“Since a man spends more time in his right brain, he may be more likely to sense a situation and take action intuitively. He responds immediately with sexual feeling to sex objects, bypassing the planning or long decision-making process that a woman may engage in. If a woman says something that a man does not want to hear, he may not respond verbally, but spatially as he moves to the TV to watch ESPN. A woman, on the other hand, may have long debates in her head before she comes to a decision and takes action. Such internal thinking and deliberation are left brain activities.

Because men do seem to have more difficulty with feelings, one might conclude that they must not be in the right half of their brain after all. On the contrary, however, they often compensate for their feeling impediments by replacing the uncomfortable feelings with other ones. Typical compensations are: they may feel sexual in situations that are not particularly sexual, they may resort to addictive behaviours as a distraction, or they may get angry in situations that might call for a different response.”

Oh bugger! No longer will I be able to rely on a woman’s intuition to get my way…There goes another weapon in my arsenal!Hey! Does this mean men are more primitive?

Mind you, I’m not all that astonished that some of us have found this assessment to be fairly accurate. Women have been known to over-analyse, be indecisive and are particularly fond of that dreaded phrase, “We need to talk”.

But this still doesn’t tell us where impulse buying fits in!

“The theory is saying that, on average, males and females differ in whatthey are drawn to and what they find easy, but that both sexes havetheir strengths and their weaknesses. Neither sex is superior overall.”

I suppose there is only one deduction that could be made from such findings: